Dale Chrystie is a Business Fellow and Blockchain Strategist at FedEx who has been in the transportation industry for over 30 years. He also serves as chairman of the Blockchain in Transport Alliance (BiTA) Standards Council, and is a member of the Blockchain Research Institute. In this podcast Dale walks us through the work FedEx is doing in the blockchain space and his view on why he believes the future of blockchain is an open source one instead of a consortium one.

 

What is blockchain?

Dale believes that to effectively define what is blockchain to as wide an audience as possible you need to use basic language and basic concepts. He boils blockchain down to five words: digital, ledger, permanent, transparent, and shared. Blockchain is a digital ledger that is permanent and uses cryptography. Once an entry is added to the ledger it can’t be changed. It’s transparent to all relevant parties and it is shared which is to say it exists on the cloud.

 

Having said that, Dale is also known for characterising blockchain at conferences as boring and useless. Because blockchain is just a database that sits amongst many other tried and tested databases that are fast, process millions of transactions, are enterprise ready and ruggedised. Blockchain isn’t quite there yet. It isn’t very fast, scalable or mature. However, what it does, it does really well. For example, where authenticity and provenance matter, blockchain will completely change worldwide supply chains.

 

Challenges of the logistic industry and the role blockchain can play

The logistics industry is one where information systems use paper legal documents and electronic data is transmitted via electronic data interchange (EDI) and where documents are often shared via email, fax and courier. In the freight industry or the Less than Truckload (LTL), industry as it is known in the US, has been using paper process with bills of lading, documents and manifests for decades. Dale believes it is ripe for moving forward into the digital world.

In 1978, Fred Smith founder of FedEx, is famous for saying "The information about the package is as important as the package itself." For Dale, Smith was way ahead of his time as that statement still holds true today. He believes that we are at this very unique intersection of the physical world and the digital world. Where on one side you have the physical world and on the other you have a digital twin of it which contains data about the package.

Blockchain is the first technology where companies will be able to share selected data in a peer to peer fashion without the need of middlemen.

For Dale, blockchain has opened our eyes to what is in the realm of the possible. He doesn’t think of blockchain as process improvement. He thinks of it as a breakthrough technology. As he states if you look at blockchain as process improvement you can do this with existing legacy technology. If you look at blockchain within the breakthrough realm then no existing legacy technology could have changed the art of what is possible and the nature of the conversation as blockchain has done.

 

Fedex blockchain journey

Fedex’s blockchain journey started around a process in the dispute resolution area that was causing freight claims for a couple of million dollars a year. Around that time Walmart had a few early use cases in the food safety space which had inspired Dale on how blockchain could be used. The identified issue was for a three party dispute resolution scenario involving a receiver, a shipper and a carrier. The issue was that the receiver was ordering hypothetically 100 items from the shipper via a purchase order.